Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

Earl of Oxford and Asquith Excerpts

Friday 19th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Oxford and Asquith (CB)]

My Lords, I am opposed to the Bill, partly on principle and partly on specific matters of detail.

On the issue of principle, first, I believe that the Bill will radically alter our society’s view of the value of life by introducing a utilitarian calculus of value. As the noble Lord, Lord Frost, and others have said, if assisted dying is to be determined by that calculus, then very quickly, what appears to deliver the most efficient outcome for the NHS and patients will become acceptable. That will fundamentally change the culture of medicine and the therapeutic role of doctors and carers which we have accepted for millennia. Assisted dying is not a medical treatment. Ending life is not a therapeutic act. Most people do not believe and have never believed that doctors should be allowed to recommend a dosage of lethal substances.

Secondly, the supposed defence of autonomy or optionality is perhaps not what it may seem at first sight. Once you have legalised the option for assisted dying, within no time, you will have created a right to die. Not one of us has exercised an option to be born. Indeed, an ancient Greek thinker, in one of his gloomier moments, suggested that if we could be offered a choice to be born, we should be best advised to refuse it, on the grounds that suffering is endemic to humankind. Once we establish a choice to die, to withhold such a right will amount to discrimination against a person. Once discrimination law rises in the ascendant, there is no limit to its zenith.

On matters of detail, I, like many others, have very severe doubts about the criteria for eligibility in the Bill. In other countries, as we have heard, we see the rapid expansion of eligibility criteria. It has become discriminatory to restrict assisted dying to the terminally ill. We learn of assisted dying being offered to sufferers of many non-terminal physical and mental afflictions. As it stands, I now wonder whether we may have to reject the Bill itself to prevent incremental expansion of eligibility criteria alone.

There is abundant evidence that there is no possibility of providing 100% safeguarding against coercive influence, whether overt or covert coercion. This is probably one of the biggest questions to which the Bill cannot offer an answer. Coercion is always likely to be present if you cannot get the basic care you need.

We have spoken a great deal already about palliative care. The noble Lord, Lord Baker, has told us that investment in palliative care is not a “political alternative”. Is that so? He may be right in the short term, but I do not think that to abandon such an aspiration can be endorsed as a justification for inaction.

The strongest motive among terminally ill patients for requesting or desiring an assisted death is not so much insufferable pain but their feeling abandoned, unvalued and cast aside on the scrap heap, for which no society has the care. If they can be helped to feel valued, their mentality can entirely change. The feeling that you are a burden is one of the strongest motives for suicide. If the Bill works specifically to address intolerable suffering, perhaps assisted dying could more respectably be presented as a last resort for intractable suffering.

In that case, palliative care should assume far greater prominence. Of the half a million people who die in this country every year, thousands do not have appropriate palliative care in their last two months. These are the people who most need our attention. The Bill, as framed, does not address this issue at all.

Many speakers have already rehearsed several other procedural defects to the Bill, including conscientious objection and opt-out clauses, the consequences for hospices, delegated powers, the certification of drugs and lethal substances, and the absence of a coroner. Many speakers have argued that the present law is untenable. Yet, as it stands, the Bill, if passed into law, will have numerous untenable consequences over the years.

I have some sympathy with the view of the noble Lord, Lord Patten, and the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, that the Government should take over the Bill. At the very least, I support the call for a time-limited Select Committee—the Motion in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Berger—to hear evidence that could introduce further modifications, although I suspect that more and more amendments will make the Bill unworkable.

The renowned Nobel Prize-winning physicist Werner Heisenberg wrote:

“I am firmly convinced that we must never judge political movements by their aims, no matter how loudly proclaimed or how sincerely upheld, but only by the means they use to realize these aims”.


In my judgment, the Bill is not safe; there are just too many defects in it that need to be dealt with. Most fundamentally, if the ultimate aim of the Bill is to relieve suffering, self-evidently, the means proposed are not therapeutic.